Saturday, July 29, 2017

Not normal bourgeois politics: Criminalizing political differences

Liberals witch hunt to impeach Trump driven by fear of the working class

BY SETH GALINSKY

The shrill and unrelenting witch hunt by liberal Democrats, some Republican politicians and most of the bourgeois news media who accuse President Donald Trump of “colluding” with Moscow to “influence” the 2016 presidential elections, has reached a new fever pitch. These forces thought they had finally reached a “gotcha” moment when Donald Trump Jr. admitted he had had a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin in June 2016.

The witch hunt is aimed at criminalizing what are in fact political differences in order to force the impeachment or indictment of President Trump and bring down his administration.

Trump is the target of an open-ended investigation by special counsel and former FBI chief Robert Mueller, as well as both the Senate and House intelligence committees.

The New York Times giddily ran an article July 22 that they had uncovered a memo by Kenneth Starr, who served as special counsel assigned to look into possible impeachment of then President Bill Clinton, that said a sitting president could be criminally indicted.

Liberal papers, nighttime TV talk shows, morning commentators and countless others with blood in their mouth are full of calls to bring Trump down.

This is not normal capitalist politics.

The capitalist rulers saw something new and different in the 2016 elections that kindled fear of the working class. The object of their fear isn’t Trump, but the workers they saw behind his victory. Millions of workers and farmers are beginning to see that the capitalist political parties have no solutions for the carnage they face from today’s deepening crisis of capitalism — except throwing the monetary and human costs of their crisis onto the backs of working people. The rulers fear what they see coming out of this — sharpening class struggle.

“The media often reports that Trump won a majority of voters without college degrees, which is taken by Trump supporters as just a nicer way of being called stupid,” Gary Abernathy, editor of the Times-Gazette in Hillsboro, Ohio — where Trump won 75 percent of the votes — wrote July 21. For millions of people, he says, when Trump calls charges of collusion with Moscow “fake news,” he “strikes a chord because the Russia hysteria is not real news, either, not compared with the issues that impact their daily lives.”

What is important here for class-conscious workers is not that Trump is better politically than the liberals, he isn’t. His goal, like theirs, is to defend the interests of the capitalist system in a time of crisis.

But the appointment of a special counsel, and fawning praise from the liberals for this former FBI top cop, is dangerous for the working class. The special counsel is called out when the rulers are looking to get someone. He starts with a target and then goes to work to find something to use. He digs with no time limit, no limits on what he can investigate or the charges he can bring. His appointment undercuts the constitutional protections to due process in the Bill of Rights.

And bringing down Trump would tell millions of workers who voted for him that their votes are less meaningful then the liberals’ political vendetta.

Trump fights back

Trump has begun to call out those he suspects of being part of the “leakers” feeding the press frenzy. And others he believes have made it easier for the liberals to use whatever they can get their hands on to take him down.

This is what’s behind his complaints that Attorney General Jeff Sessions betrayed him when he recused himself from having anything to do with the “Russian collusion” charges.

And Trump criticized Sessions for failing to investigate Hillary Clinton over the scandal that found she had illegally sent and received “top-secret” information on her personal computer.

In a remarkable turnabout, the liberal press has now become a champion of Sessions, a politician they have pilloried as a racist and reactionary. The July 27 Economist ran an article headlined, “Jeff Sessions Is in Peril; So Is America.”

Trump went back on the road to mobilize the workers who elected him against the liberals’ crusade. He spoke to an overflow crowd of more than 6,000 in Youngstown, Ohio, July 25.

When he said he was glad to be “back in the center of the American heartland, far away from the Washington swamp,” he got some of the biggest cheers of the night, with loud chants of “Drain the swamp.”

“I don’t care for the hatred directed towards him or the people who supported him,” Dave Torrance, an African-American Trump supporter who attended the rally from Hermitage, Pennsylvania, told the New York Post. “There have been plenty of presidents I did not vote for, but I always want them to be successful so that our country is successful.”

“He’s exactly who we wanted, someone fresh, different, not a politician,” Roxanne Jewell, of Orangeville, Ohio, told the Post.